Cheers to Governor John Kasich, whose FY 2016–17 state budget also includes important charter school reforms, especially in the area of sponsor quality (which you can read about elsewhere in this issue of Ohio Gadfly). While there are incentives being proffered for achieving higher quality, it should not be overlooked just how much the bar is being raised in Ohio. If the governor is successful, sponsors and schools who fail to reach the mark will not just miss out on incentives; they will be out of the education business.

Jeers to the drawing of false battle lines. Walnut Township Schools in rural Fairfield County is heading for a fiscal abyss. They must cut nearly a million dollars from their budget by February 10 or risk being placed under fiscal emergency by the state. At an emergency board meeting on February 4, a budget-cutting plan was unanimously approved, which still might not be enough to keep them away from state oversight. But two members said on the record they were only buying time to avoid the emergency declaration and have no intention of following through on the voted plan. Why? They see the state as an enemy. At a February...

Patrick O’Donnell dives deep into proposed charter school reforms in both the governor’s budget and in HB 2. He and those he interviews seem to have concerns about what they see as a “sponsor-centric” approach to reform. It is a complex topic, as is clear by the length of the piece and the sheer number of voices included, and some details are missed. But overall, it’s a superior discussion at what will be an important issue in the early months of the 131st Ohio General Assembly. (Cleveland Plain Dealer)

Another hot topic in the realm of school choice is the EdChoice Scholarship Program. The application window is now open and tens of thousands of students across Ohio are eligible to leave their persistently-low-performing public schools to go to a private school of their choice with a voucher. Once they find the right fit, they can stay in their private school all the way through graduation, no matter if the performance of their assigned district school improves. It is likely this latter issue that has some folks in Dayton City Schools determined to limit the number of students leaving the district with an EdChoice Scholarship. You can read their arguments against vouchers in this extensive DDN piece and make up your own mind as to their validity. Personally, I think the best way to keep families

TFA TROUBLETeach For America’s slipping numbers continue as they experience their second year of diminishing applicant numbers. The group says the appeal of an improving job market is to blame, while some aspiring teachers have deep concern with TFA’s two-year long model. Perhaps played down in the article is a shift to diversify cohorts of teachers, which could also be a factor in diminishing numbers.

LOOKING FOR MIDDLE GROUNDSenators Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray are reportedly putting their heads together to create a bipartisan proposal for ESEA renewal. Yet there is much skepticism as to whether a fully collaborative bill will be produced; last week, Lamar Alexander said that an NCLB update didn’t necessarily have to start with a bipartisan product. When the Senate Education Committee passed a bill in 2013, not one Republican voted for it.

HEASTIE FROM THE BLOCKBronx legislator Carl Heastie has been elected to replace the recently resigned Sheldon Silver as speaker of the New York State Assembly, granting him the power to decide which bills are considered and which aspects of the state budget are negotiated. His (relatively quiet) views on education will be important for the more than one million students that are part of the New York City school system and the $8 billion annually set aside in the budget. What do we know about Heastie so far? His policy plans align somewhat with union priorities, he’s pro-charter, and he will bring overdue...

Giant geekout at the Ohio Statehouse yesterday – better known as Straight-A Innovation Day, where schools, consortia, and projects funded by the previous two rounds of state innovation grants were showcased. The AP story is a little dry, so if you’re looking for more juice, check out Twitter and search #StraightADay. My favorite was from a young lady who Tweeted: “You know it’s a good day when the governor compliments your robot.” Indeed. (Dayton Daily News)

Speaking of technological geekouts, this story is about a student in Pennsylvania who is attending school from home via robot while his broken leg heals. It is clipped in an Ohio paper, however, and one local supe sounds pretty stoked by the idea. There IS another round of Straight A Funds called for in Governor Kasich’s new budget. Just sayin’. (Ashtabula Star Beacon)

THE SWEET SMELL OF CREEPING DISILLUSIONMENTThe older students get, the more pessimistic (or perhaps realistic) they become regarding their future job prospects, according to this Gallup Student Poll. While 68 percent of fifth graders strongly agreed with the statement, “I know I will find a good job after I graduate,” only 48 percent of twelfth graders expressed the same sentiment. Whether this is a reflection of the rough young adult job market or a simple loss of youthful optimism, schools are increasing focus on their students’ college and career readiness.

STATE YOUR BUSINESSSenator Lamar Alexander has indicated his leaning towards keeping federal testing requirements in the new ESEA bill, but giving states the freedom to choose how they use it to hold their schools accountable. Michael Petrilli says it well: “States should continue to experiment with various interventions in low-performing schools. But let’s admit that we don’t know precisely what that should look like, and thus we definitely shouldn’t prescribe a particular approach from Washington.”

CAP'S OFFWisconsin Governor Scott Walker unveiled his proposal for the 2015-17 education budget, with plans to extend voucher participation beyond the thousand-student cap and increase accountability through revised school report cards. The charter school sector can also expect to see an additional $4 million in funding, to be put towards the creation of a state board charged with the approval of new school authorizers.

TREASURE MAPBecause the people demanded it: Education Week has assembled...

Yesterday saw a Q&A between House Education Committee members and the sponsors of HB 2 (the charter law overhaul bill) as well as the start of committee hearings on HB 7 (the bill which would, among other things, give students a “safe harbor” from PARCC test results). Not much to say at this point on the testing bill – that will come – but it was interesting to hear how very open the sponsors of HB 2 were to lots of other recommendations to improve the charter sector over and above what’s already in the bill. Call us, members of the committee, we have some more recommendations. (Gongwer Ohio)

Editors in Cleveland opine on standardized testing in Ohio today. The specific issue of cutting testing time is not yet on the legislative radar, but the calls continue. (Cleveland Plain Dealer)

Editors in Cleveland also opined on the governor’s budget proposal this week, saying “there’s a lot to like” in it. Among the education provisions, charter law reforms get a thumbs-up from PD Tower while district funding reforms get a wait-and-see-but-we’re-inclined-to-be-bothered. (Cleveland Plain Dealer)

President Obama released his 2016 budget proposal this week, and the media welcomed it with loads of over-analysis. Yet Congress has no use for it. One Republican House member went so far as to call it “laughable.” It won’t guide legislation for the next twelve months, regardless of what it says about testing or charter schools or anything else. Moreover, the Republicans’ aversion is based on far more than partisanship. The $4 trillion budget is packed with new taxes, yet still isn’t balanced—a major problem when the government is already borrowing money for the programs we have. The White House called it the “beginning of a negotiation.” Translation: It’s unreasonable, and they know it.

How do we get new and better private schools of choice? That’s the question AEI’s Michael McShane and a cadre of researchers and practitioners dive into in this new edited volume. The book and a corresponding conference acknowledge that “better is not good enough.” Indeed, for far too long, supporters of school choice have been content with merely providing alternatives to district school options on the assumption that choice was a sufficient guarantor of quality. Instead, this book calls for a “nimble, agile, and market-driven” system of schools. Among the high points is Andy Smarick’s look at what has worked in chartering: incubation (leadership pipelines, start-up capital, strategic support, and political advocacy) and network building. He also reprises his call for “authorizers” to oversee publicly funded private schools. McShane agrees that this model could “provide oversight without stifling the set of options available for school choice.” Perhaps. But private schools, from Catholic schools to those providing alternative curriculum, often see themselves as working toward ends that are more than academic. Could they maintain their distinctive flavor in a marketplace that could devalue their mission? New and Better Schools is a smart look forward in private school choice programs and a thoughtful critique of how and where these programs have not thrived.

I’m no testing hawk. I’ve written plenty at Fordham and elsewhere that’s critical of test-driven ed-reform orthodoxy. Accountability is a sacred principal to me, but testing? It’s complicated—as a science, a policy, and a reform lever. Anya Kamenetz’s new book The Test is not complicated. She strikes a strident anti-testing tone right from the start. “Tests are stunting children’s spirits, adding stress to family life, demoralizing teachers, undermining schools, paralyzing the education debate, and gutting our country’s future competitiveness,” writes Kamenetz, an education reporter for National Public Radio. If you’re looking for the good, the bad, and the ugly on testing, well, two out of three ain’t bad.

Part cri de couer, part parenting manual (she may hate testing, but Kamenetz still wants her daughter—and your kids—to do well) The Test is particularly tendentious on the history of standardized tests. “Why so many racists in psychometrics?” she asks (her prose is often glib and always self-assured). “I’m not saying anyone involved in testing today is, de facto, racist. But it’s hard to ignore the shadow of history.”

What is easy for Kamenetz to ignore almost entirely is that some of the strongest support for testing comes from civil rights activists who have used test scores to dramatically alter the education landscape and highlight achievement gaps, all in the name of equality. But this runs counter to her argument that testing “penalizes diversity.” Kati Haycock may have once led affirmative-action programs for the University of California system,...

Education governance puts most people to sleep. The topic is arcane, sort of boring and, above all, seemingly immutable. If you can’t do anything about a problem, why agonize over it, or even spend time on it?

Of course, some people don’t even see it as a problem. They just take it for granted, like the air surrounding them, the sun rising in the morning, and the Mississippi flowing south. It just is what it is.

That’s wrong-headed. The governance mess is a large part of the reason that so many education problems are impossible to solve. As Mike Petrilli and I wrote three years ago about “our flawed, archaic, and inefficient system for organizing and operating public schools”:

[America’s] approach to school management is a confused and tangled web, involving the federal government, the states, and local school districts—each with ill-defined responsibilities and often conflicting interests. As a result, over the past fifty years, obsolescence, clumsiness, and misalignment have come to define the governance of public education. This development is not anyone’s fault, per se: It is simply what happens when opportunities and needs change, but structures don’t. The system of schooling we have today is the legacy of the nineteenth century—and hopelessly outmoded in the twenty-first.

Perhaps the foremost failing of that system is its fragmented and multi-polar decision making; too many cooks in the education kitchen and nobody really in charge. We bow to the mantra of “local control” yet in fact nearly every...